Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. We're glad you're here. Here are a few links for finding your way around, and for learning more about Wikipedia.

Wikipedia can be confusing and overwhelming, especially for the new editor. However, despite its anarchic appearance, Wikipedia is a fairly well-formed community with distinct community norms. No matter what your interests -- whether it be editing articles on topics you love, doing research on virtual communities, or verifying factual information -- there is bound to be a group of people on Wikipedia who are interested in and committed to the same topics and goals. Remember, you are judged on Wikipedia by the quality of your contributions to the encyclopedia and to the community. The way to influence the project is to dive in.

If you are coming to this page as a librarian or information professional, a warm welcome to you! The contributions of LIS professionals are both welcomed and needed on Wikipedia. We can use our skills of organization, fact-checking, clear writing, and helping others to bring about a measurable difference in the quality of Wikipedia articles. Furthermore, Wikipedia is a "hot topic" and a very rapidly growing resource, which will continue to have a growing impact on the information universe. Thus not only is contributing important, but learning about the project is key, so as to be able to accurately critique it, use it, and discuss it with patrons. There are literally dozens of resources for helping you find your way around and answering your questions, some of which are collected here. I hope this handout will help you find the information you need to contribute, and identify the places that you can go in order to learn about Wikipedia further. Feedback is welcome. Enjoy!

-- Phoebe Ayers 23:20, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Resources for a first time editor:

• How to edit a page -- start here...
• Then move on to the multi-part Tutorial.
• Editing help has an extensive list of commands and markup; helpful as a reference after you have gotten the hang of the basics.
• Article style and conventions are outlined in the Manual of Style.
• Finally, take a look at Contributing to Wikipedia and how to write a great article!

Getting help

• The Wikipedia Help pages bring together pages on almost anything you might want to know about.
• Asking questions, otherwise known as the Wikipedia FAQ, breaks down the different forums available for asking questions. The FAQ pages here can likely answer almost any question; this collection of pages is well worth reading through and summarizes much of what is available on other pages.
• Questions on using Wikipedia can be posted on the help desk.
• Almost any experienced user is happy to answer questions posted on their talk page, or direct you in the right direction...

Introduction to Wikipedia culture and policies:

• The Five Pillars of Wikipedia are the "guiding principles" behind Wikipedia's philosophy.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is the legal parent organization of Wikipedia.
• Here is information about resolving disputes that occur on the English-language Wikipedia. The Deletion Policy page may help answer questions about how and why pages are deleted, which is one of the more contentious areas on Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia Policies and Guidelines provides an overview to policies and guidelines on Wikipedia, as well as how they are created; a list of official policies is also available.
• Want to know about Wikipedia in the media? A gateway to the hundreds of published stories about Wikipedia is available here.

• You may also want to explore the articles in the category of Wikipedia Basic Information.

How to help

Want to help out on Wikipedia, but don't know where to begin?

• The community portal often has good suggestions (scroll down to to-do lists). Fix-up projects are often easy clean-up tasks; collaborations can be fun.

• For cleanup projects, see cleanup resources

• The Fact and reference check project, which tries to address currently unreferenced and unsourced articles, always has a huge backlog and can use help.

Resources for Librarians:

• WikiProject Librarians is a project for librarians to identify themselves and various collaborative projects to work on.
• Introduction to Wikipedia culture for librarians tries to explain the madness to those coming from LIS.
• The category page for Library and information science lists articles that have been identified as dealing with LIS topics. All of these articles could benefit from review, and there are likely hundreds of other articles that need to be tagged with this category.
• There's also sure to be something to do over at the Fact and Reference Check Project.

• Other suggestions for things librarians can do:
  • Check your local cataloging. Often, Wikipedia is listed on subject or resource guides, or sometimes even fully cataloged. Unfortunately, due to the dynamic nature of this resource, these records are very often outdated or wrong. It is probably best not to list a specific article in the record, but rather provide a basic description from Wikipedia:About. Note particularly that Wikipedia is not published by the Free Software Foundation as stated in some OCLC records. Instead, as of Dec. 2008, Wikipedia is published by The Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, California. The official title is "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia," and the general link to the English-language Wikipedia is http://en.wikipedia.org/; a general link to the portal page is http://wikipedia.org.
  • Talk to your patrons. Wikipedia provides one of the best resources available for teaching information literacy -- implicit in the design of the site is the idea that you need to check everything you find there, which can be expanded to a discussion of verifying all information.
  • Use and advocate for Wikipedia as a "gateway source." Wikipedia's extensive references, external and internal links can be used as a great way to get a basic idea of a topic and find out more about it. Just be sure to also use outside sources!

Some things Wikipedia is good for:

• Doing research with Wikipedia -- helps break down in general the kinds of topics that Wikipedia can be helpful for.
• Why Wikipedia is so great examines why Wikipedia is a good idea.

Some things Wikipedia is not so good for:

• Why Wikipedia is Not So Great has a long list of the possible problems with Wikipedia.
• See also What Wikipedia is Not.

Tips for evaluating Wikipedia pages:

• Basic steps for evaluating the quality of a Wikipedia page include:
  • Look at the page edit history, including how recent the article is, how many people have contributed to an article, whether those contributors were logged in, and whether there is any evidence of ongoing edit wars.
  • Look at the quality of the writing and whether it both reads well, and whether it conforms to Wikipedia conventions (including whether terms are internally wiki-linked, whether sections of the article are broken out, and in general whether the conventions spelled out under Manual of Style are followed).
  • Check whether there are citations listed (particularly in-text citations and references, versus simply outside links).
  • Check the article's talk page, if one exists, to see what comments have been made about the article or whether there is evidence of any controversy.
• Doing research with Wikipedia has a set of steps for analyzing an article
• See also the (very new, and still in draft stage) How to Read an Article History.

Communicating with other Wikipedians

Besides asking questions in the appropriate places, there are several ways that Wikipedians communicate with each other and discuss upcoming projects.

• Article and user talk pages provide the primary means of discussion about articles and between users.
• Community pages, such as the Community Portal and the Village Pump collect general discussion, information about what is going on and what needs to be worked on. I recommend visiting these every so often just to find out what's going on in the Wikiverse. If you're interested in project-wide issues, you may wish to visit the goings-on page on Meta. You may also want to read The Wikipedia Newspaper.
• Project pages are a good way to find out what other people are working on or find a project to join.
• Email mailing lists are open to all. You can also view the archives of them online before subscribing (note that some are very heavy traffic, while others are lighter).
• There are various IRC channels that are used as well.
• You may also want to see if there is a Wikipedia meetup group in your area. And don't forget about Wikimania!